Iran steps up Russian drone supply
Britain, US, warn of deepening alliance in coming months
Iran and Russia have deepened their military alliance and are working on building joint drone production lines, British and US intelligence warned. The British Ministry of Defence said that the Kremlin was now reliant on Iran to top up its supplies of missiles and drones.
“Iran’s support to the Russian military is likely to grow in the coming months: Russia is attempting to obtain more weapons, including hundreds of ballistic missiles,” it said.
It comes after the US said that Iran is now “Russia’s top military backer”.
“Russia is seeking to collaborate with Iran in areas like weapons development training,” said John Kirby of the US national security council, adding that Russia intended to “provide Iran with advanced military components” including helicopters and air defence systems.
Russia has so far relied on Iranian drones to bolster its dwindling supplies of missiles after nearly nine months of war and has been deploying them to destroy power stations and other civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. Iranian drones, the Shahed-136 is the most common, are cheap to produce, and have a long range.
Russian technicians have repainted them as Geranium-2 to try to disguise them and Iran has denied supplying Russia but testimonies and reports from Ukraine have confirmed the deals.
Now an unnamed security official has told The Washington Post that Iran had agreed to send 6,000 drones to Russia and “to supply designs as well as technical supervision for the planned Russian drone factory, which is expected to be located in the Tatarstan region”. Tatarstan lies in central Russia. The source said that Russia would pay Iran $1 billion in addition to “still unknown inducements”.
Russian forces have turned the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut into ruins, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, while Ukraine’s military yesterday reported missile, rocket and air strikes in multiple parts of the country that Moscow is trying to conquer after months of resistance.
The latest battles of Russia’s 9 1/2 month war in Ukraine have centered on four provinces that Russian President Vladimir Putin triumphantly — and illegally — claimed to have annexed in late September. The fighting indicates Russia’s struggle to establish control of those regions and Ukraine’s persistence to reclaim them.
Zelenskyy said the situation “remains very difficult” in several frontline cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Together, the provinces make up the Donbas, an expansive industrial region bordering Russia that Putin identified as a focus from the war’s outset and where Moscow-backed separatists have fought since 2014.
“Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna. For a long time, there is no living place left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, naming cities that have again found themselves in the crosshairs.
Some buildings remain standing in Bakhmut, and the remaining residents still mill about the streets. But like Mariupol and other contested cities, it endured a long siege and spent weeks without water and power even before Moscow launched massive strikes to take out public utilities across Ukraine.